Happy (Sustainable) Holidays!

 

 

Book Report: A Walk Across America,Peter Jenkins

 
Peter Jenkins has reaffirmed his place as my almost-hero with his book A Walk Across America (1979).

It is quite obviously his first literary effort. The reader has to wade through gratuitous exclamation points and corny, unnecessary dialogue. His metaphors are either trite and empty or over-elaborate and clunky, rarely adding to the meaning or mood of his descriptions. He uses a new adjective before his dog’s name every time the dog is mentioned: “brave Cooper,” “powerful Cooper,” “playful Coops.” I wondered whether Jenkins had been studying Beowulf and its poetic epithets. The book reads like an unabridged adolescent’s diary.

If you manage to ignore the style, though, the underlying story is redeemingly amazing. Jenkins had just graduated from a small college in Upstate New York and was recovering from a dizzying marriage and divorce. He felt like he needed to go somewhere and considered traveling abroad because, along with the rest of his generation, he saw too many faults in America. A wise, old friend suggested that he see for himself whether America was worthless or worthwhile, and Jenkins decided to do just that. He would walk across the country with his dog, getting to know its people and places for himself, before passing final judgment.

This book follows him from Alfred, NY to New Orleans. (A sequel takes him the rest of the way west.) At first, he simply enjoys the act of walking through the peaceful autumn countryside. He becomes comfortable sleeping amidst the Halloween-sounds of the nighttime woods and builds the stamina to walk 20 to 30 miles per day. Once snow begins to fall, Cooper’s puppyish enthusiasm with jumping through snow banks energizes them both. He spends a few days on the Appalachian Trail but turns off when he remembers that his goal is to understand local people.

When he runs out of money, Jenkins stops in friendly towns to find work. He lives with a black family in their trailer in the Appalachian foothills. He spends a few weeks in an old-fashioned Southern plantation and on a commune. He wins the trust of a notoriously crotchety hermit, surprising nearby villagers, who placed bets on whether Jenkins would return alive. He shakes hands with Governor George Wallace. He ends up in a seminary in New Orleans to write a memoir for National Geographic. He is honest about his stereotypes of people and places, cultivated in a buffered, Eastern upper-crust suburbia, but he is willing to march through his phobic preconceptions and discover what life is really like at a Christian revival and on an Appalachian farm. Again and again, he is surprised by the friendliness and generosity of the people.

Jenkins’ epic story wraps itself up as nicely and magically as a fairy tale. By the time he reaches Louisiana, he has found not only faith in America but also a career as a writer, religion, and a fiancé. He has lived through a tornado, drunken brawls, small-town suspicion, a deadly strain of influenza in a backwoods cave, and even the death of his beloved dog. Having read his 2001 Looking for Alaska, I am reassured that both this second marriage and his writing career flourish (and that he learns to conserve exclamation points and euthanize strained metaphors). The moral of the story: if you trust your instincts and trust other people, the rest of life will fall into place.

How perfect: the hero journeys away from home into the unknown wild-lands in order to have many adventures and find his place in life. Joseph Campbell would be proud.

That’s the kind of heroic challenge I’d sign up for. Even though I’ve fallen in love with Ithaca--wacky, liberal, smug Ithaca--I feel like I’m waiting for something. Maybe that’s a consequence of perennial unemployment, or maybe I’m getting anxious after living in one place for so long. I spend my days fencing, hiking, biking, journaling, and daydreaming. I have no epic project to work on, no heroic goal to aim for. Earning a degree would fit into that category. For some people, performing on Broadway or competing in the Olympics also fits. Maybe raising children does, too. I’m ready--desperate--for something to dedicate myself to, even something as senseless as walking across a continent.

Any suggestions?

Logbook Wisdom

 
Leave a blank book in the middle of the woods for a year, and what happens? It becomes a Rorschach test for hikers, except the hikers leave the inkblots. The books are part community message board, part graffiti canvas, part group diary, and part rainy day diversion. Most entries record little more than names, dates, and destinations, with occasional musings on the beauty of the surroundings, but here are a few other uses that hikers thought up:

• Thank-you card: “Dear lean-to adopters and trail maintenance crews...”
  
• Autograph collection: What would your trail name be? I followed the exploits of the likes of the Rondackers and Bachelor Bob. A string of letters and numbers followed some names: NTP 2004, LT 99, AT, GA-->ME 06-07. This code is the hikers’ version of adding Ph.D. or F.R.S. to their names, like medals of honor, or brief resumes of the trails they’ve walked. Bachelor Bob followed his name with alphabet soup, which lent weight to his frustrated criticisms of signage and trail maintenance issues. Since I was walking in his footsteps for a few days, I could only commiserate in my own entries.
  
• Travel guide: Most NTP hikers walk northward, so the rare southbound hiker reaps a harvest of cautions and recommendations about the trail ahead.
  
• Opinion forum: Hot topics include the necessity of fire bans and the tension between historical preservation, public accessibility, and the wilderness aesthetic. Also popular are impassioned essays against the inevitable lean-to litter.
  
• Breadcrumbs: A rescue party can play connect-the-dots until they find where a missing person’s entries leave off.
  
• Directory: Entries noted the best firewood-gathering grounds and the most productive fishing spots.
  
• Confessional: A gay couple confessed to accidentally “showing off” while skinny dipping to a Boy Scout Troop. Unsurprisingly, such incidents happen on an apparently regular basis.
  
• Religious testament: Spiritual moments strike people often in the wilderness, but I was confused by the praises to God’s aesthetic sense at Duck Hole, a reservoir.
  
• Sketchbook: A few disturbingly practiced adolescent drawings wait patiently among entries, hoping to shock unsuspecting browsers. Elsewhere, innocent illustrations retell hikers’ adventures in graphic-novel style.
  
• Backwoods girl talk: “When Aunt Flo comes calling a few days early, sphagnum moss offers a comfy and absorbent solution.”
  
• Weather monitoring station: Dripping wet hikers need somewhere to vent their weather-related frustrations.
  
• Wilderness survival guide: “Remember the computer game Oregon Trail: meager rations and a grueling pace means everyone dies!”

 

The Pantry According to Rachel

To be recited prior to the ceremony of the Ingestion of the Animal Crackers.

1 Praise Thee, O Circus Animal Crackers!

2 Never before this Day have You been so anticipated through such Tribulations and through so many mud Puddles.

3 For you are the perfect Union of refined Sugars, enriched bleached Flour, red Dye #2, partially hydrogenated palm kernel, soybean, cottonseed, and/or canola Oil, and traces of Peanuts.

4 No multitudes of pestilential Blackflies nor host of bloodthirsty Mosquitoes can dissuade me from partaking of Your pink and white Frosting.

5 Your cookie Center imparts Strength unto weary Muscles, and your multicolored Sprinkles bring joy to heavy Hearts.

6 This Day the very Weather turned against me, but through this Flood, You have remained at my Back (specifically, in the confines of my Pack).

7 May you be forevermore my Source of Sustenance in the Wilderness!

 

Food Poetry

 
Oatmeal, oatmeal, perfect food,
Breakfast, cookies, lifts my mood.
Gorp, granola, raw or stewed,
Fills me up with fortitude!
 

Sing Along

To the tune of the Scout camp "Swimming Hole" song,
composed during a rather wet day over a mountain pass.

Hiking, hiking, on the mountaintop,
Wet's the day, but stay and play
In the muddy glop!
Uphill, downhill, tramping 'til you drop,
Don't you say this mountain day
Should never, ever stop!
 

Musings from Blackfly Season

• When I squish blackflies on my face, is their cause of death blunt trauma or drowning in saltwater?
  
• How many calories are in a blackfly? There’s not much meat on one, but think of them like grains of sand on a beach. With as many as I caught in my tent each night, I could have had a hearty meal. They already flavored my oatmeal and pasta. I’m surprised I didn’t choke by breathing them in.
  
• Do blackfly guts count as hair-care products? After a few days, I had more of that on my scalp than shampoo.
  
• If humans are 80% water, how much water is in a blackfly? It sounded like it was raining when I sat in my tent, but it was the ticking of many dozen blackflies throwing themselves against the tent wall. I put on my raincoat to go outside, with the hood up and the sleeves cinched tight around my wrists. I used my scarf more for insect protection than for its intended purpose.
  
• Do insects make inter-species alliances? I could usually escape blackflies by jumping into a river. At the Cedar River Flow near Wakely Dam, however, I was nibbled above by flies and below by fish. That was not fair.

Blackflies Versus Customers

I quit my retail job to go hiking in the thick of blackfly season. This is why.

Why Blackflies are Preferable to Customers

• The police don't have to get involved when you squish the life out of a blackfly.
  
• Customers are there all year round.
  
• Blackflies are supposed to have the IQ of an insect.
  
• They both carry diseases, but the bite of a customer is more painful.
  
• I've never had a blackfly become belligerent when it sees through my attempts to fake a full working knowledge of hedge trimmers.
  
• Blackflies don't care whether the surrounding plants are perennials or annuals.
  
• In polite conversation, it is acceptable to refer to blackflies as part of the local wildlife.
  
• Blackflies prefer to stay downwind.
  
• There's a spray for blackflies.

How to Avoid Adirondack Bears

 
 

 

Post Title

   Adirondacks   

 

 
And this is where the post will set up camp.

Chez Tramper

Welcome to the Chez Tramper! Here, all of your hiking-day hunger will be assuaged by a multitude of gourmet grains, gorps, granolas, and chocolates. Our resident menu crafter has spent many hours meticulously counting calories and proportioning carbs, proteins, fats, fruits, and all-too-rare veggies into weeks of satisfying meals to tame your tastebuds. In fact, she has donated 85% of her apartment floor space to our establishment as a preparation and staging area. (She also hopes she did not frighten the maintenance guy during his recent unannounced visit, although she’s pretty sure she left a path between the door and the fuse box.)

Our menu crafter takes her job seriously. She begins by modifying the familiar food pyramid to meet hikers’ special caloric needs as well as weight and bulk restrictions. As a veteran of many a raisin overdose, she balances fiber with particular care. She supplies carbs liberally. She believes that pretzels are a fine addition to gorp, assuming they are passed through a mortar and pestle, and that ramen noodle dust is just as nutritious, easier to eat with a spoon, and certainly more convenient to pack, than ramen in its pristinely wavy form. For special occasions, she might suggest splurging on a liquid sauce to add to the night’s rice or pasta. A packet of palak paneer from the Indian foods aisle might be worth its unfortunate heft for its spinach-infested greenness on day 10 of your journey. Homemade granola is her specialty.

Protein is easier to bring to the woods than many imagine. Peanut butter and mixed nuts are longtime standbys, as are beef sticks and jerky. A trip to the natural foods co-op reveals multiple flavors of dried bean mix, and even everyday grocery stores offer vacuum-sealed packets of precooked chicken hidden among the tuna cans. Some protein also comes from the cheese in your macaroni and parmesan and from your crackers and Swiss or sharp cheddar.

You may soon come across the Chez Tramper brand off the trails. During the course of experimenting for ever-better tramping food products, our intrepid team of food scientists has discovered many substances new to epicurology. Entrepreneurial specialists are currently working to find alternate markets for these innovative substances. For example, our head research chef, deviating from a recipe for hardtack (bland but rugged crackers), discovered a process by which hockey pucks may be manufactured. Our peanut butter granola bars will be marketed to dentists as saliva sponges: pop a crumb in the patient’s cheek, and the good doctor won’t have to bother with his spit vacuum.

We offer a sampling of our fine menu below. Recipes are available upon request. Shipping and handling fees apply in addition to the basic per-meal cost and all applicable taxes.

Le Menu

Breakfasts

*Homemade granola

Choose from Maple Nut, Honey and Berry, and Apple Cinnamon.

*Instant oatmeal

Fortified with brown sugar, fruit, nuts, and powdered milk.

*Pop Tarts

Note: Must pack your own toaster.

Lunches

*Peanut butter and jelly

Additions to this classic include candied ginger slices, Nutella, or chocolate chips.
Note: Available on your first few days; available subsequently on an experimental basis.

*Pretzels/crackers with beef sticks or pepperoni and Swiss or Seriously Sharp Cheddar

Allow us to suggest our homemade hardtack. These thick, crisp crackers, subtly flavored, can survive long periods of in-pack abuse. In case they are not eaten, they double as heirloom mementos of your trip which you can pass down to your children and grandchildren.

*Peanut butter, cracker crumbs, and dried fruit

A fine alternative to classic PBJ.

Entrées

Mix and match the following grains, proteins, and flavorings:

*Grains

Rice, ramen, pasta, couscous, buckwheat.

*Proteins

Meat stick slices, pepperoni, grated parmesan cheese, dried bean mix, precooked chicken packets.

*Flavorings

Bullion (always a classic)

Italian herbs (basil, oregano, garlic powder, onion powder)

Tabbouleh (parsley, garlic powder, onion powder, and a hint of mint)

Various other powdered and liquid flavoring packets from the baking and international foods aisles

Snacks

*Banana chips

*Salted mixed nuts

*Dried fruit

*Crumbs

Available in cereal, pretzel, or cracker flavors.

*Crumbled gorp

This gorp cousin was born from the leftovers of our menu crafter’s kitchen and includes pretzel and Corn Chex crumbs studded with chopped pecans and dried tidbits.

*Variations on the theme of gorp

*Various granola and energy bars

Desserts

*Hot chocolate

*M&Ms

*Chocolate-covered sunflower seeds

*Chocolate-covered candied ginger

Ticks and the Post Office

I called several Adirondack post offices recently in order to check up on the procedure of food dropping. These calls required almost as much planning as the rest of the trip. It’s possible that out of everything that makes me anxious about this trip (chiefly ticks, bears, and starvation), what I’ll have to worry about most is coordinating my arrival at post offices to fall within their business hours. Trickiest of all is the hour, or two, in which each closes for lunch, staggered apparently to avoid some Adirondack-wide stampede to the best lunch counter this side of Lake Champlain. I offer a sampling by way of example:

Piseco (pop. 200)
Mon-Fri: 9:45-12, 1:45-3:45 (Perhaps suggested by a random number generator?)
Sat: 11:30-1 (Note to self: avoid obtaining a pen pal from Piseco.)
Blue Mountain Lake (pop. 146)
Mon-Fri: 8-11, 12-4:30 (3/4 the size of Piseco, with double the PO hours... perhaps a town of dedicated catalog shoppers?)
Sat: 8-12
Long Lake (pop. 852)
Mon-Fri: 8:30-12:30, 1:30-4:45 (I assume they close early to avoid the excruciating Long Lake 5:00 rush hour?)
Sat: 9-12
Lake Placid (pop. 2638)
Mon-Fri: 8:30-5 (This bustling metropolis is far to cosmopolitan to shut its doors for lunch.)
Sat: 8:30-12:30
Keene (pop. 1063)
Mon-Fri: 8-12, 1-4:30
Sat: 8-11
Keene Valley (pop. ?)
Mon-Fri: 8-1, 2-4:45
Sat: 8-11:45

However inconvenient their eccentricities, the postmistresses make up for it in helpful friendliness. At Blue Mountain Lake, she answers the phone in that typically dull voice indicative of business phone veterans with a mouthful of spiel to get out while the caller patiently waits their turn. But as soon as I mentioned that I was a hiker and not, say, some local adolescent calling to ask how much a one-cent stamp cost, inflection breathed life back into her words and she became chatty like only a bored, small-town PO worker can be. She explained in detail how to address my care package: “General Delivery--Hungry NPT Hiker,” with an approximate date of arrival and a phone number to call three days later, because she won’t have hikers lost in her woods. We discussed weather reports, blackfly densities, and trail conditions. She asked politely about my plans and became inordinately cheerful when I told her I’d be alone. She explained that she was a determinedly pro-girl-power Girl Scout leader. How strikingly different from the last time I told a post office worker my hiking plans. The lady behind the window in Wellington responded with, “You know that hikers die in the mountains when they’re alone, don’t you?”

As an afterthought, I asked about this year’s tick forecast. “Oh, we don’t have much trouble with ticks,” she replied. The only people she’s known to have picked up ticks caught them down near Albany. Could this be so? I laughed out loud when I hung up the phone. You mean I won’t have to watch the silhouettes of ticks patiently and methodically scaling the tent walls as I lay down to sleep? I won’t have to pry tick mouthparts out of my flesh every hundred feet? (Part of the tick oogey factor must have to do with the use of the term “mouthparts” and descriptions of how they break off and remain embedded in your skin if you’re not careful. I intend to be very careful, thanks.)

The trip suddenly felt almost too easy. In the last few weeks, I’ve been coming to terms a succession of anxieties. First was bears. Once I convinced myself that bears don’t regularly munch on tent poles at 3 a.m. unless the tent’s inhabitants have been frying up salmon steaks by their bedside, I was free to worry about food. Once I planned out filling meals and ample snacks delivered via several mail drops, I wondered whether my feet would be able to keep up with my tramping schedule. After a few ambitious local hikes, I decided I could make myself walk forever if need be, unless the trail was infested with ticks. And now I’ve run out of gripping concerns.

Now all I have to worry about is breaking an ankle in the next two weeks. Or unknowingly dropping the car keys into a beaver pond at mile marker 54. Or spending my end-of-trip bus money on salad and chocolate in Long Lake, because the bust stop at the Noon Mark Diner doesn’t accept credit cards. Or arriving at the wrong post office at 4:50.

Shindagin Hollow

The Tale of
Shindagin Hollow
 

Coming Soon!

The Plan: Rough Draft

For the last week, maps of various regions in the Northeast and Midwest have covered the floor of my apartment like intricate Girl Scout sit-upons after a particularly rambunctious meeting. Now there is a plan, and it follows the Northville-Placid Trail (NPT).


View Larger Map

This track won the bid for several reasons. The region garners rave reviews for its scenery and size. It’s also the right length for my time frame. The current draft of the plan calls for leaving on Tuesday, June 10 and returning to Ithaca sometime around June 30 so that I can spend July 4th on Pewaukee Lake. That gives me three amazing weeks, making me feel rich with good fortune, even if I am an unemployed bum.

Plus, the trailhead is close, 170 miles or just over 3 hours away, assuming I don’t miss a turn in Ephratah or Herkimer or Fink Basin. Google’s directions might as well be a journey through the villages of Dr. Seuss, written in the format of an epic free-verse poem.

By the last stanza, I should be on the south end of Adirondack Park, a conglomeration of wilderness areas interspersed with squares of private land and tiny hamlets that takes up most of northeastern New York State. If you open Google Maps in just-plain-map mode, it’s that big green splotch upstate. In terrain mode, it looks like a rough-textured green scab. These mountains were made differently than the ancient, eroded Appalachians, which take the shape of narrow, curving ridges snaking up and down the Eastern Seaboard and were created by tectonic collisions. The Adirondacks are more of a fat, warty toad than a snake. They are still growing by a couple millimeters a year, being pushed skyward by an ambitious bubble somewhere below the Earth’s surface.

Officially, the NPT begins in the little town of Northville just inside the southern border of the park, but the trail follows the road several miles to Upper Benson before disappearing into the woods, and that’s where I’ll begin. (I feel no need to be an end-to-end purist if it means a day of roadwalking.) The trail wanders 133 miles north, skirting or passing through the villages of Piseco, Blue Mountain Lake, and Long Lake, before finally petering out on the southern outskirts of Lake Placid Village. Along the way are lean-tos or huts like the ones I saw in Shenandoah: three sides, a roof, double-decker sleeping platforms for 6-8 people. Usual amenities include a privy hidden away nearby, a spring or stream for water, a fire ring, and tent sites. Trail maintenance should be noticeable, although the beaver population sounds eager, as they are, to fill the trail with water.

The official NPT guidebook, put out by the Adirondack Mountain Club (ADK), offers sample 10-day and 15-day itineraries, but it’s frustratingly impossible to determine how much ground I’ll be comfortable with covering on each day. I can compare mileages from previous trips, make sensitive measurements from 1:60,000 topo maps, and even walk the entire length of the trail virtually courtesy of Google Earth’s three-dimensional fly-thorughs. Even high technology can’t tell me how often I’ll loose an hour by mistaking an old logging road for the trail, or whether an impending thunderstorm will persuade me to set up camp early, or whether I’ll have a series of high-energy, keep-going days. I do have a few rest days built in that I can convert to mileage make-up days if need be. What I mean to say is that all proposed schedules come with emphatic disclaimers.

If I spend the first two weeks on the NPT, I can spend the remaining week wandering thought the High Peaks, the crowing glory of Adirondack Park. The High Peaks are a particularly topographically intense area just southeast of Lake Placid containing New York State’s highest mountain, Mt. Marcy (1,629 m/5,344 ft), a member of 46 summits in the area over about 4,000 feet. The spectacular scenery has made it the most popular area of the Adirondacks. A visit is required of every upstate resident, preferably at least once a year. Because of the popularity, the local bears have become wise to the ways of hungry humans and their flimsy bear bags. Bear cans are required here by park regulation.

Food is the limiting factor. If people didn’t have to eat, our packs would weigh nothing and we could roam the wilderness endlessly, besides instantly and conveniently solving world hunger. Unfortunately, this is currently not the case, and so I’m stuck with the logistical challenge of resupplying about every six days and crunching my Ramen into noodle dust in order to fit enough non-perishables in the bear can. One popular resupply method is to mail yourself packages care of local post offices and then making sure you end up in, say, Blue Mountain Lake (pop.: 146) on a non-holiday weekday morning or afternoon, but not when the PO closes for lunch.

The last major roadblock, or rather trailblock, remains transportation. There is no set shuttle service from Lake Placid to Northville. I could take an all-day bus ride to the town of Gloversville on the south edge of Adirondack Park, but I’d still be 20 miles away from my car at 9 p.m. in an unfamiliar town. Walking a giant loop back to Northville would require more time than I have, extensive roadwalks if I want to avoid retracing my steps, and scratching the High Peaks from the schedule.

Assuming transportation works out, here’s the rough draft plan:

Date	Day	Miles	Where to
Tue 10	1	7.1	Ithaca to Upper Benson to Silver Lake Hut
Wed 11	2	10.4	Hamilton Lake Stream Hut
Thu 12	3	10.7	Through Piseco to Fall Stream Camp
Fri 13	4	9.6	West Canada Lakes Huts
Sat 14	5	0.0	Rest Day
Sun 15	6	4.1	Cedar Lakes Huts
Mon 16	7	11.8	Wakely Dam Campsites
Tue 17	8	8.5	Stephens Pond Hut
Wed 18	9	7.9	Past Blue Mountain Lake to Tirrell Pond Hut
Thu 19	10	10.6	Through Long Lake to Catlin Bay Huts
Fri 20	11	5.9	Plumleys Huts
Sat 21	12	7.3	Seward Hut
Sun 22	13	7.0	Duck Hole Huts
Mon 23	14	8.9	Leave NPT for the High Peaks and Scott Clearing Hut
Tue 24	15	0.0	Floating Rest Day
Wed 25	16	9.5	Whispering Pines Campground near Lake Placid
Thu 26	17	???	High Peaks
Fri 27	18	???	High Peaks
Sat 28	19	???	High Peaks
Sun 29	20	???	High Peaks
Mon 30	21	???	Back to civilization, or at least as far as Ithaca

Farewell Party

If I keep my fingers well and truly crossed, and maybe if I do all my chores and finish my brussels sprouts and promise not to stick my tongue out at my sister, there’s a possibility that Home Depot Girl might be able to hang up her orange cape forever. I’ll find out in May whether I have an alternate employer, to start sometime in July-ish (although nothing’s gonna stop me from being on Pewaukee Lake for the Fourth this year).

If this happens, I’d like to give HDG a farewell party. I’m thinking of having the theme be “endangered animals.” I could bring HDG to the middle of some deep, dark woods and release her into the wild, never to be seen again.

This requires taking off the month of June and planning a long-distance tramp. But where to? Which woods or hills would you, gentle reader, visit if you had three weeks to kill? Am I forgetting anything critical, like an appointment I penciled in three years ago for June 15, or the fact that without a timely intervention, I will be tramping pantsless? (Which is true. There’s an inopportune hole in my current pair. I imagine hoards of ticks crawling through and writing to all their friends about how they found a nice, cozy spot in the shade on the banks of an artery, and that they’re thinking of building a tick hotel with maybe an amusement park and guided tours to my ankles.)

Ice Age Trail
St. Croix Falls, WI (just opposite Taylor’s Falls, MN) to Kettle Moraine State Forest to Sturgeon Bay

It was many, many years before my first real tramp, when I naively assumed that a lively day hike was the epitome of outdoors enjoyment, when I was first introduced to the Ice Age Trail. Mom and I would hop on our bikes and spend a day on the Glacial Drumlin Trail for sundaes at LeDuc’s. En route, where the bike trail skirts the north edge of Kettle Moraine State Forest,a wide, inviting path is mown through a grassy field and disappears tantalizingly into the trees. My bike, although willing and loyal on pavement, balked at the wildly uneven ground on the path, so its origin and destination remained intriguingly mysterious. Mom told me once that it was the Ice Age Trail and that it meandered all over the state, from top to bottom and side to side, following the southern extent of the glaciers. If you started walking, you could keep going almost forever. How gripping to a Covault, to whom turning around on a trail is considered an admission of defeat and often requires multiple dire warnings of slow and painful deaths to hikers who proceed. I vowed someday to follow that broad, sunny, seductively welcoming path into the woods, not stopping until I ran out of trail.

It turns out that my imagined trek wouldn’t have been as epic as hoped. At present, according to its website, the IAT looks more like a dotted line than a solid trail. Longish stretches cross state forests (including Kettle Moraine) and jump through state parks, but between these scenic stints are many miles of roadwalks and shortcuts through towns. The trail seems to beg for forgiveness by passing miniscule county and city parks on the way, like a desperate tour guide in a land with no word for “tourist.”

I think my ten-year-old self would forgive me for skipping over the IAT, for now. There are bigger mastodons out there to spear.

North Country Trail
Eastern New York State through the Fingerlakes Trail to Ohio’s Buckeye Trail, up Michigan and across the UP, over Minnesota and ending in the middle of North Dakota

I didn’t realize until a year or two ago that it’s possible to walk home from Ithaca on trails. Within 20 minutes’ drive of Pleasant Grove Road, I can find trail markers bursting proudly with the compass-rose-cum-northstar emblem of the North Country Trail along with a tiny map of the seven states I could cross if only I kept walking. The NCT tries its best to cross half the country, taking advantage of many established trails along the way, but there’s also plenty of roadwalking between public lands. Since I’ve already seen most of the Ithaca-area NCT where it coincides with the Fingerlakes Trail, I was considering jumping ahead to the UP to see what the land of Blackjack looks like in summertime. The NCT wanders through the Porkies and through Ottawa, Hiawatha, and Superior National Forests, finally jumping the Lakes at the Mackinaw Island Bridge. I’m told the bridge is quite impressive. I’ve been there once. My sister and I oohed and ahhed at the pea-soup fog as our severely disappointed parents described the stunning vistas allegedly surrounding us.

Other pluses include a relatively peaceable bear population (as opposed to that of the Adirondacks, which essentially behave like a fat breed of dog and expect to be fed like one) and the perhaps tenuous possibility of pressuring friends and family into chauffeuring me to and from trailheads. There’s topography but not in the extreme, and the Northwoods always seem serenely inviting, even in winter.

On the other hand, it’s hard to tell, without buying the various guidebooks, how much of the NCT is physical trail and how much is either roadwalk or even a dotted line gestating in someone’s imagination. Plus, as long as I’m in the East (and who knows how much longer that will last), I might as well see the Eastern sights while they’re relatively convenient. And it might be easier to cut my long-distance teeth on a more established trail.

Appalachian Trail
Georgia to Maine

This is the obvious choice. It’s solid trail for as long as I have time to hike. Ammenities include huts and latrines and a plethora of information on the quirks and how-tos of each mile.

But I hesitate to step on Andrea’s bootlaces. That’s her and Tony’s quest, later this year. (Happy tramping, sister!)

Long Trail
Crosses Vermont from Maryland to Canada, coinciding with the AT for the southern half

It takes 270 miles and about 30 days to cross Vermont the long way. The Green Mountains, like all mountains in the East, stand in remarkably narrow ridges, leaving little room for multiple north-south trails and therefore little opportunity for loop hikes, requiring creativity for trailhead and trail-end transportation.

Still, mountains tend to make for good scenery, and there are plenty of huts along the way. But there might also be plenty of people, of course.

Northville-Placid Trail
Northville, NY through the Adirondacks to Lake Placid

It borders on criminal negligence to have lived in New York State for as long as I have without having climbed Mt. Marcy in Adirondack Park. (It’s not precisely clear to me what sort of “park” it is. It’s not national, nor state, nor local. It’s just a big green blob on the map, as if an intern at the cartographer’s spilled a glob of green ink and then wrote “Park” on the splotch, glancing repeatedly over his shoulder to make sure that his mentor was still busy in the next room. Due to its ink-drop origin, this area has one particular bonus: it’s round. This opens the possibility of multiple north-south trails, meaning a loop might be made. I’m still researching the reality of this possibility. I haven’t yet found a trail map of the whole park. It’s too big.

But nowhere is perfect. Possibly because of the legions of outdoors enthusiasts who make their Mt. Marcy pilgrimages in summer, hiker-bear relations have been deteriorating recently. At least one clever bear has figured out how to pop open the bear-proof food canisters of the model I took to Shenandoah. Bear canisters are required and must be a park-approved model. And I’m terrified of any bear not behind bars in a zoo. Maybe some bear exposure is exactly what I need to put this fear to rest. But is it worth the price of several days’ worth of food and a chewed-through set of Tupperware-on-steroids?

Anywhere Else?

This weekend I’ll visit EMS and chat with Cornell Outdoor Education, and maybe post to the Cornell Outing Club list for advice. We’ll see. Any suggestions or comments from the audience?

	Solid Trail	Loop	Easy Trailhead Transportation	Low Bear Density	Low People Density
IAT			X	X	X
NCT	?		?	X	X
AT	X		?	?
LT	X			X	?
NPT	X	?	?

Tramping Shenandoah

March 18 - 21, 2008

Let's try something new. Google Maps offers map editing tools into which you can embed text and photos, which sounds to me like a useful storytelling technology. Below is a link to my Tramping Shenandoah map. My route is marked as a blue line, and you can click on icons along the way for photos and explanations. Begin at the blue car in the northeast and follow the blue line south (clockwise) over Buck Ridge.

Enjoy your virtual tramp!

(Alternately, you can see the same blurbs and photos as a blog.)

Read Me: Looking for Alaska by Peter Jenkins

For writing this book, Jenkins is almost my hero. He managed to turn his occupation into moving to Alaska and having as many adventures as possible in one year, then writing about it. Sign me up! But the book wasn’t really about moving to Alaska as much as it was about Peter Jenkins moving to Alaska. The popularity of his previous books, especially A Walk Across America (1979), enabled him to sell this book idea to his editor. (Side note to Tricia: Well, it looks like a smidgeon of fame isn’t all bad after all...) Granted, he does a good job of letting his interviewees do the speaking and inserting his own humble narrative voice only to give color and perspective. Still, I wouldn’t mind crossing the Lower 48 by foot if I got to write a successful book about it afterward, and then move to Alaska.

I say that Jenkins is almost my hero because the book that I would write after a year in the (original) frozen tundra would be radically different than Looking for Alaska. People fascinate Jenkins. He travels in order to collect relationships, to experience different ways people live, to learn how people cope with and thrive in so many situations. What he likes to remember about a place is that slower-than-necessary drive down that empty road, listening to a local granny recall a lifetime of stories. The very middle of nowhere, an extended snow machine ride off the vehicularly harsh Haul Road, is represented by a surprisingly civilized house and its quiet inhabitants. The far north, near Barrow, means Native whaling expeditions whose leaders read the ice as if it was a Shakespeare sonnet. Jenkins’ Alaska is less the stereotype unpeopled wilderness than a space dotted with villages, in a glass-half-full kind of way. Parts of his book go almost too far, becoming laundry lists of the admittedly interesting characters he meets, as if to prove that people do in fact live there: mountain-man backwoods bachelors dressed perpetually in flannel; strong, gun-toting women; knowledgeable children on whose chores rest the livelihood of their families.

All good reading... although an Alaskan tradition is for Outsiders to move there in order to avoid people, not to seek them out, which is the camp I would join. People like Jenkins can go anywhere on Earth and find interesting people just waiting for someone to ask them to tell their life stories. And when people like Jenkins do so, I’m quite willing to read the resulting books, because I’m unlikely myself to walk into some arctic fishing village and pretend to be interested in the details of someone’s broken marriage (even if it is a broken Alaskan marriage). Instead of experiencing people, I would visit Alaska to experience the land: midnight sun and noontime darkness, unimaginable cold, northern lights, suicidally obedient sled dogs, neighborhood herds of musk oxen, omnipresent bears, tundra, taiga, mountains, a thousand versions of ice, and hiking through as much of it as possible.

(But then, who would read a book whose theme is “isn’t that a pretty mountain?” No one wants to read a book devoid of people. That would be either a natural history textbook or a nature walk pamphlet. Some authors get around it through personification: talking pigs, haughty housecats, dragons that behave like flamboyantly-dressed circus fire-eaters. And why not? We can’t possibly know how a pig really thinks, so authors must necessarily imagine and project people-thoughts into the piggy heads. I barely know what my own self is thinking half the time. As we await scientific consensus regarding the inner lives of African grey parrots and apes using sign language, I’m stuck writing the book All the Neat Scenes Rachel Saw on her Summer Vacation until I learn to dull my distaste of small talk long enough to hone interviewing skills.)

Still, I give Looking for Alaska a thumbs up for accomplishing one of the goals of any book, allowing me as the reader to have vicarious experiences I would not otherwise have—with the added bonus that the interesting parts about bears and kayaking and the Iditarod and near-death experiences aboard various bush planes are all distilled from the dreary small talk and dead-end leads Jenkins had to wade through.

Surprisingly, the book dealt not only with Jenkins’ dealings with his new Alaskan neighbors, it also talked about his relationships with his own family. His wife lived with him in Seward between his frequent road trips. Various other family members made long visits or traveled with him. His college-age daughter, Rebekah, made regular appearances. Jenkins brims with pride for her as he watches her find her place in the world as a writer, just like Dad. He even gives her space in his book to write about her own Alaskan experiences (in prose as pleadingly flowery as the Teleflora delivery truck on Valentine’s Day morning, which is to be expected for a wannabe writer not far out of high school). He also brims with parental advice—not suggestions on helping your kid avoid teen angst or quieting an infant at 3 a.m., but rather advice on coping with your children’s successful coming of age. Jenkins notes Rebekah’s newfound self-confidence, developed during a recent NOLS outing and exercised during various Alaskan exploits. He is proud that she is growing up and becoming independent, but it is inevitably a bittersweet pride for giving up his “little girl” and relinquishing his role as protector. He struggles to tame his parental shielding instinct in order to send Rebekah to a tiny village above the Arctic Circle to live with two guys he knows only from emails and a handful of telephone calls. She can take care of herself now, even alone in the arctic with strange, lonely men.

While reading, I felt a bout of anti-homesickness coming on. Reading reminded me of what it feels like to move far away for a year, that excitement for constant newness and daily opportunities to explore. Everyday tasks become adventures. Planning a trip to the grocery store elicits eager anticipation. If you include navigating public transportation systems, the possibilities for epic expeditions become infinite. By the end, you can say with conviction that you have accomplished something that year. You’ve learned. You’ve been faced with daily challenges, many of them quite bizarre, and survived.

Sure, there’s lots to recommend staying put and becoming deeply familiar with one place, developing a history with a place. And there’s something to be said for the ability to work on long-term relationships instead of continually answering where you’re from and what brings you here. (Wouldn’t it be more efficient to print out that introductory speech on business cards to give out?) There are vast differences between talking to someone who’s known you since birth versus chatting with the insta-friend in the next hostel bunk.

But I’m greedy, I have to see every inch of the planet before I can decide where the ideal spot to settle down is. Or maybe that’s being thorough. All I know is that my brain feels good, as if it got a subcutaneous massage, when its exploration cortex gets exercise.

I had to wonder whether Alaska deserves the top spot on my Ideal Future Home list. I think I’d have to go find out for myself. Anyway, I’m now itching to go somewhere. And writing a best-seller about it wouldn’t be half bad, either.